Mum's the Word

I’m out here in the cornfields of southeast Iowa, where a bunch of people sit around and get paid to be quiet. Really. Some of them have been here for three years, sponsored by entrepreneur Howard Settle and his wife Alice. They get a monthly stipend, plus room and board. Two hours of learning computer skills in the afternoon. The rest of the time, shhhh. And not just keeping their mouths shut, but closing their eyes and stilling their thoughts and quieting their entire physiology.  So where is true silence? When we’re deep asleep, for sure, but we’re not aware of it then. During waking there is always some sound, even in the most controlled environment. Composer John Cage once visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, where all sounds made in the room are deadened, but still “heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.â€� 

Fairfield is the home of Maharishi University of Management, or, appropriately, M.U.M., where I’m teaching a month-long music appreciation course to 16 delightful undergrads. Twice a day, 2,000 of us gather and practice the Transcendental Meditation program, brought to the West 50 years ago by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. There are still plenty of sounds — the pounding rain, the blast of freight train whistles. But inside there is a silence that is indescribable.

It’s silence with a difference, measured more than 30 years ago by physiologist Keith Wallace and many times since then in hundreds of studies around the world,  revealing the existence of a fourth major state of consciousness that he described as a “wakeful hypometabolic physiologic state.â€� At M.U.M., all the students, faculty and staff, as well as many of the local business people, even the mayor of this town of 14,000, meditate twice a day, and the silence they generate in their bodies and brains spreads far beyond the cornfields. This, some say, has a quieting effect on society, measured by less crime and illness, fewer accidents.

Filmmaker David Lynch has a foundation that pays for at-risk teens to learn this technique, and in schools around the world, thousands of young people are learning what it is to quiet their minds and feel for the first time a respite from the anxiety and stress of their often dangerous surroundings.

Now that’s something to shout about. 

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less